FROM BUSINESS WORLD OF 17 AUGUST 2006
Prisoners of their
cultures
Long ago,
when C Subramaniam was finance minister, I once interviewed him on All India
Radio. It was a blazing hot day; when he came in, the girl in charge offered
him a coke. “Coca Cola! I don't drink it,” he snorted. So I asked for one. “Do
you like Coca Cola?” “I love it,” I said.
That was
an exaggeration then, and not true any more. I quite like Coke and Pepsi, but I
hardly ever drink them; I prefer iced tea, or khus and lime juice, or gin and
tonic. But after the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) came out with its
latest report, I went and drank a Pepsi. That is not because I think that the
manufacturers are right, or CSE is wrong. Nor is it because I am reckless. It
is simply because I know that whatever standards any government authority fixes
will be ultra-conservative, and that one should not worry if one is imbibing 50
or 100 times the official limit. I do not agree with CSE that “Pesticides are
tiny toxins and deadly for us if we are exposed to quantities higher than what
is defined as an acceptable limit.” No “acceptable” limits are defined; all we
have are officially declared limits, and they are a considerable multiple of
what our bodies can tolerate.
Further,
I simply cannot believe for a moment that the manufacturers are adding
pesticides to their drinks; I cannot think of any reason why they would do
something so stupid and pernicious. So if their soft drinks contain pesticides,
they must have come from the inputs, of which the principal ones are water and
sugar. I take plenty of both, so I am probably imbibing thousands of times more
pesticides from these mass consumption goods than from cold drinks. Is that
safe? It may not be, but I cannot avoid it if I live in this country. It is
just one of the consequences of having such a hapless government.
It does
intrigue me that CSE measures pesticides in only the soft drinks of the two
companies, and never in Haldiram’s snacks or United Brewery’s beers or Tatas’
Tea. It strikes me that the latter are all “indigenous”. So is it xenophobia?
Anti-Americanism? Populism? Probably it is just some kind of faith, which makes
this kind of selectivity look reasonable.
Talking
of the government, Parliament did appoint a Joint Parliamentary Committee after
CSE’s 2003 rumpus. It told the government to define pesticide standards for
soft drinks (the standard CSE uses is the European Union standard for drinking
water). Apparently, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has defined a
standard, but is not publishing it because the ministry of health has objected.
It is possible that the ministry of health has been instigated by soft drink
manufacturers or their associations who do not want the standard to be
promulgated.
I know
that all kinds of murky politics and intrigue go on, and I have no intention to
argue in favour of the manufacturers or CSE. It does seem to me, however, that
there ought to be no standard for soft drinks, or any processed food products.
Anyone can mix and cook and freeze and dry and soak a set of natural foods in
various proportions and make up a new food product; a literally infinite number
of processed foods can thus be created. BIS cannot go about chasing every new
food product that comes out and setting a new standard for it; it would be too
much work. The right way is to define standards for the primary natural inputs
that go into the processed products. Thus for coke, there should be standards
for water, sugar, caffeine etc; the standard for coke can be derived as an
average of the standards for these inputs weighted by their input-output
ratios.
Finally,
I do not have much faith in the way we go about fixing standards, appointing
ponderous committees and asking ill-equipped domestic laboratories. It would be
better to identify other countries which fix standards on the basis of
extensive live experiments or other sound techniques, and adopt their
standards. If they do not have a standard for something, their laboratories
should be asked to make one up for us. In any case, we need more information
about how other countries go about it – and less prejudice.
